A young boy from a different ethnicity got murdered and mutilated by a bunch of angry boys from my ethnicity, after he was found making videos of our girls in our own town. A few years back, my friend called me to spend the night at his home and as we went to buy dinner for us, he confessed about his first time sleeping with a girl. A year later, on a cold winter afternoon, we went to have soup and he once again brought up how he had slept with another girl. The third time he talked about being with a girl physically, he was almost depressed. On our way back home after having coffee during the month of Muharram, first month of Islamic calendar, he expressed his guilt-induced doubtful and rather angry beliefs about how most of the girls from our ethnicity sleep with boys behind everyone’s knowledge.
Over on the social media, I’ve seen stories about how girls from our town have slept or ran away with men of other tribes, or how wasted girls and boys were caught during physical activities in the picnic areas of our town. Videos have been leaked that can never be taken back, pictures keep pouring out every now and then. The availability of sex-workers, through the stories I’ve heard and keep hearing, seem almost ubiquitous and just a few phone calls away.
I, on the other hand, haven’t been a participating agent, but have mostly been on the receiving end of these spreading stories. I’ve come to realize that those who find themselves in opportunities of such nature, and understandably go on to commit the acts to certain degrees, then find it almost impossible to keep it to themselves. Whether it is the excitement, sense of achievement, guilt, or an unintentional urge to bring others into proximity, the committers rush to confess, but more like share their stories with those around them. Some of them lucky to have someone they trust, others not even minding who they are telling it to.
Of course, when the society takes such turns and stories start to surface, we are all responsible in one way or another. But most of us are almost blind to our hypocrisy when we violently react to such affairs, knowing little of our own behaviours, if not in such an exposed and opportune incident, but in little, daily occurrences that carry more or less the same motives, desires, and consequences. Most of us, me included, are sinner who haven’t been tested yet.
What these stories have in common is the aggressively painful exploitation of not only a taboo, both societal and religious, but an exploitation of the ‘other sex’ that we are meant to protect and keep in check. It is staining the very purity that we so naively want to keep untouched. And it hurts. It is almost a personal event for each individual, even if it happens to someone whom we don’t even know. To picture such images of naked bodies, involved in acts that are extremely prohibited, prior to their legality - is intensely destressing. A single, even isolated case, makes for a general perception, and suddenly we find ourselves thinking that it is happening behind every closed door, and everyone is doing it.
Mottley’s debut novel tells a story of a young girl, who being pushed to pay the mounting rent and caring for her neighbour’s abandoned boy, finds herself in sex-work. Although it starts as an incident, the money she gets favours her worsening condition; she chooses to see it as only sex, striped down from its dogmas. But things get worse: his elder brother gets involved in drugs after realizing that music won’t cut for him; her mother is absent, locked in a psychiatry hospital after she cut herself when her newborn was floating in the shitty pool; her father is dead. Cops find her in the midst of it one day, and from then on, she becomes the sex-service for men of different badge numbers; who at best exploit her by paying her, and at worst uses with her without any payment.
It is a desperate story, told with a considerate vulnerability and sympathy for the protagonist. It’s almost too easy that Kiara finds herself so trapped, so quickly, with everything crumbling by her side. Mottley manages to writes a poignant story which involves Ki’s relation with her friend, brother, mother, Trevor, a boyfriend she never accepts, and flashbacks of her life before she started to live in the cold nights alone by herself. We remain disgusted, yet the act requires our participation as well.
Ratings: 4/5 **** October 10, 2022_